


In the Cold Hours

by LucyLovecraft



Category: Ogniem i Mieczem | With Fire and Sword (1999), Trylogia | The Trilogy - Henryk Sienkiewicz
Genre: Angst, Developing Relationship, Feelings, M/M, Morning After, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-06
Updated: 2018-03-06
Packaged: 2019-03-27 23:19:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,372
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13891260
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LucyLovecraft/pseuds/LucyLovecraft
Summary: Bohun tries to slip away in the night, as he always does. Jan has had enough and confronts him.





	In the Cold Hours

**Author's Note:**

> From Tumblr angst/fluff prompt "Why are you doing this?" asked by danu-ixchel.

“Why are you doing this?” Jan demanded.

The early morning was freezing cold, and Jan was shivering in his linen shirt. His hands were ice, and all he could feel of his feet was a dull sense of the unyielding, frozen mud pressing hard against his bones. He did not care.

He had woken to find the bed empty as he had many times before. He had hoped this time would be different, but now he must make it so. This time, fury had carried him out of bed, out the door, across the yard of the little steading, and into the stables where he'd known Bohun would be.  
  
“I have to go.” Bohun gave his horse’s saddle girth one final tug.

The Cossack was fully-dressed and nearly ready to depart. He moved soundlessly as he worked, seeming to belong to this grey, pre-dawn world. It made Jan feel like an intruder, as if he did not have every right to be standing here confronting Bohun with his intended flight.  
  
“That is no kind of answer,” Jan said, through chattering teeth. He hated himself for having thought this time would be different. Every time, he let himself hope, and every time he was given the fool’s reward he so richly deserved.  
  
“And how should I answer such a question?”  
  
“You might have the decency to face me.”  
  
Bohun turned to Jan but offered no more of himself, regarding him with a closed-off, inimical expression.  
  
“And you might stay,” Jan continued, “instead of skulking away like a coward.”  
  
“Do you call me a coward?” Bohun asked, soft as the stillness around them and just as cold.  
  
“I do: coward.” He could not help the hatred with which he spoke the word; Bohun had earned it with every night they’d spent together and every morning Jan had woken to find him gone. A particularly violent shiver seized him, but when it passed, Jan glared up at Bohun. “When you say such things as, ‘I have to go’, what can I hear but, ‘I am afraid’?”  
  
With bitter triumph he saw fury kindle, Bohun’s dark face growing wan and terrible.  
  
“I am not afraid of you, Jan Skrzetuski.”  
  
“I had not said you were,” he stepped closer, hunched over and his arms held tightly around himself as another shiver wracked him, “but you are, and of more besides.”  
  
Bohun’s hand twitched towards his sabre and Jan’s lip curled, cold and pain making him cruel: “And even so you tell me you are not afraid?” The shudder that ran through him made the last words come out in a stammer, but his look dared Bohun to deny their truth.  
  
The Cossack seemed rooted to the spot, unable to either fight or flee with honour. His eyes burned. In the corpse light of dawn he seemed drawn with a harsher, darker hand: the handsome features somehow exaggerated, too beautiful to be fully human. It was a demon’s face, Jan thought, or a vampire’s.  
  
_And he is a demon,_ Jan reflected. _He haunts me._

But he could not hate him.

 

* * *

  
  
Bohun could feel the trap closing in.  
  
He had scented the threat of it in the air when he’d woken in the graveyard watches of the night. All the wild, imperative instinct of a lifetime had driven him up from the warm bed and out into the cold. He retrieved his things, dressing swiftly and quietly as if for a dawn raid.

The vague awareness that the danger lay _behind_ him rather than before him changed nothing: Bohun knew only that the night’s silence was the silence of waiting ambush.  
  
Slipping out into the open air, he had stood with all his senses awake, listening and looking into the darkness. No breeze stirred the black pines. But still the steppe wind came whispering to him: from far off he sensed it, divining its voice in the unmoving air. His very being was attuned to its call and he heard the silent warning, loud and clear: 

 _Ride,_ it said.  _Ride!_  
  
And so he knew he must go, or perish.  
  
He should have heeded the call sooner. The sense of danger he’d felt as he lay in that warm, quiet room had been terrible, but it had still been a distant threat. Here, standing before Jan Skrzetuski in the night, he knew it was now too late. The peril was here with him, titanic and inescapable. It swallowed his sky from horizon to horizon. There was nowhere left for him to go, and Bohun knew himself trapped. Always he had been free to follow his every whim, as unrestrained as the wind itself. Restraint was death—and Jan would hold him.

The man looked a pitiful figure shivering barefoot in his shirt. But Jan was the peril, the snare, the cell, and the gallows all together. Worst of all, he was right: Bohun was afraid.  
  
“I am no coward,” Bohun said, and knew he must make it true.  
  
The Pole’s gaze flicked to the packed panniers and the ready-saddled horse. His lips were blue, and he seemed now too chilled to even speak. Yet Bohun saw and understood his challenge as clearly as though Jan had spoken it.  
  
He was trapped: any choice he made must be a capitulation. Yet of all his choices, the most cowardly would be to ride away from this half-naked, shivering nobleman as though frightened. And so he made the only decision he could.  
  
Stifled by hatred and shame, Bohun snatched off his cloan and threw it to Jan without looking, then turned back to his horse.  
  
Jan caught the cloak with clumsy, numbed hands, and swung it with unthinking haste about his shoulders. For a time he could only clutch the it around himself, conscious only an animal relief in its weight and warmth. He stood unmoving, uncaring, as Bohun began to unsaddle the horse and unpack. It seemed some moments before Jan could understand what he was seeing. When at last realisation dawned he said nothing but merely stood, watching.

Bohun wanted to tell him that he should go inside instead of freezing. He wanted to say that, having made his decision, he would not now steal away like a thief in the night. There was no way to voice this that would not sound weak, however, and Bohun was already furious enough that he did not now trust himself to speak without risking further humiliation. So he said nothing and unpacked as if he could not feel Jan’s gaze upon him, as if Jan were not standing there like some pale, silent spectre.  
  
When all was done Bohun pushed past Jan without a word, striding out across the open yard.  
  
Halfway across there was the sound of a curse behind him and he glanced back over his shoulder. Jan’s insensate feet had not felt the cloak’s hem as it caught underfoot on the ice, and he had tripped on it as he stepped. The Pole caught himself, but it took some time for him to disentangle his frozen limbs from the heavy folds of the fabric.  
  
Bohun did not turn and he did not offer aid, but neither did he walk on. He merely waited until he heard Jan’s footsteps, and continued.  
  
Only when they were both back in their small room did he allow himself to look at Jan. There was more light now and even with only one tiny porthole of a window to see by, Bohun thought he had seen warmer-looking corpses.  
  
“Have you no sense at all?” Bohun demanded, pushing him towards the bed. Whatever retort Jan attempted was lost in the chattering of his teeth.  
  
The Cossack shoved him under the covers, then stripped down to a shirt himself. Climbing in, he winced at the icy feel of Jan’s skin against his own. Taking Jan’s hands in his, he chafed them, blowing on them as he did so.

Jan’s grunt might have been one of thanks or it might have been a protest, but Bohun neither knew nor cared.  
  
“Fool,” Bohun muttered.  
  
Shutting his eyes, Jan Skrzetuski drew in a deep breath, then let it out again. Unable to speak, he could only nod in profoundest agreement.


End file.
